This little tale is an excellent example of beating pedantic/annoying store managers at their own game.

Gotta love a book that includes Pete Abrams’ Bun-Bun from Sluggy Freelance.

“So your job is to be evil?” Daneh said, carefully. “So you’re a construct. AI?”

“Do I look like a nonsentient to you?” the bunny scoffed. “High-end AI, thank you.”

“You must be old. A construct like you would be banned under current protocols.”

“One of the first,” Bast spat. “In the AI war was. Both sides.”

“Hey, my job is causing discord. That and watching Baywatch. Okay, and killing telemarketers. Causing discord, watching Baywatch and killing telemarketers. That’s my job. Oh, and trying to kill Santa Claus which is REALLY HARD WITH A MYTH,” he shouted as if at the universe.

“What is Baywatch?” Herzer asked.

“What’s a telemarketer?” Rachel asked in turn.

“Jeeze, kids these days,” the rabbit sighed. “I swear, if I ever find a time machine I’m going back to the twentieth century and neutering some guy named Pete Abrams. With a spoon.”

“So what was the Deal?” Edmund asked, again

“All the alfalfa hay I can eat and a big-titted blonde,” the rabbit said immediately. “I’m willing to change sides since they went south on the Deal.”

While looking at ways to fix up the cludgy CSS on this theme, I found this:

/*
 * Knock knock.
 * Who's there?
 * Ie
 * Ie who?
 * Ie like to brake your sites!
 * (Ie is pronounced like I...)
 */

Yeah, he had to explain it…

But wait, there’s more:

/* Q: Why did the XHTML actress turn down an Oscar?
 * A: Because she refused to be involved in the presentation. */

So people can see what I’m up to whilst on Holidays, I’m trying to integrate Wordpress with some sort of iCal reading plugin.

At the moment, I’m trying out the iCal Events Plugin.

Here’s hoping.

BTW: Google Calendar has launched, for those of you with Google Accounts. It’s… interesting. It’s actually the source of the calendar data for here, since Kiko doesn’t support feeding as iCal, and I cbf’ed learning how to do XML DOM fiddling in php.

I now have a Cash Passport, and the application to upgrade my cashcard to a Visa Debit card is on it’s way.

Yay for me.

Okay, so a bit of background.

Travelex offer a product called a “Cash Passport”, basicly it operates similar to a Visa Debit card, in that you load a certain amount of credit, which can then be accessed through the card. The main difference is that it can’t be used for anything but withdrawing cash from ATMs.

Other banks and financial providers charge a heck of a fee for withdrawing money overseas - it’s usually AUD$5 + 1% of the total value of the transaction for Maestro / Cirrus. They also tend to have pretty poor foreign currency rate.

The big advantage of this product is that the transaction fee is fixed at AUD$3.75, and no commision. The conversion rate is also a little bit better. You can also reload it via BSB, so you can keep your dosh in ahigh-interest savings account, and just transfer it out when needed. (It’s worth noting though that you don’t earn any interest on any money in there)

I have an account with the Newcastle Permanent Building Society, and they sent me a bunch of info a while ago about them now offering me a Cash Passport.

Yesterday I went down and got some info on it - fees, conditions, etc. Finding it quite suitable, I went down today and decided to sign it up.
I understood there was a minimum amount (AUD$250) that you’re required to deposit, and there would be a 1% (min AUD$5) account establishment fee.

Now, here’s where the difficulty started.

When I went in today (Wednesday), I said I’d like to establish the account with the minimum, and then closer to when I need it - transfer across whatever I needed at the time. The woman serving me (same as yesterday) said I should probably consider leaving it until a little closer to when I go.
I queried her comment, wondering why it would make a difference (Interest on $250 is… not much for less than a month).
I was advised that there would be additional fees for depositing cash, each time I did it (1% of deposit, minimum of $5 fee).
This was, well.. shocking to put it mildly. I asked to see where this was written that I’d have to pay fees on subsequent deposits.
Over comes the manager, who says that it’s a fee on all those products, because they’re foreign curency.
I say I don’t understand why, because it stays as AUD.
The manager says it’s a requirement, and it’s in the T&C’s.
Ok Fine, but where is that written?
The manager goes to do something else, and the teller starts looking through the documentation trying to find that particular bit of text, but unable to find anything.

Meanwhile, the manager has come back and is talking to the teller (who by now is trying to call head office, who’re all apparently at lunch), and is saying “Well, it’s like any other foreign currency transaction.” as though this is something that should be obvious, and I must be a moron.

The teller comes back, unable to contact anyone to get info, and says it’s like Travellers Cheques, I counter with “But they’re in a foreign currency - so thats understandable, this doesn’t change currencies until I withdraw it.”
She comes back with “You can get Travellers Cheques in AUD”, I’m still not convinced, since they’re just like a money order then - so, again, it’s understandable.

Anyway, I leave my phone number for her to call me.

This afternoon (4PM) I get a call back and it turns out:
1) Yes, there’s a fee for depositing via the branch (1% / AUD$5)
2) No, it’s not written anywhere yet - They’re now re-writing the documentation to include that.
3) Apart from the initial deposit, until I recieve notice of an ammendment I’ll have the fee waived.
4) No, there shouldn’t be a fee for depositing via BSB (and if there is, come back and they’ll deal with it later)

It astounds me though, that the managers attutude was “There’s a fee for all deposits. It’s not not written anywhere - You’re still going to be charged for it. Any moron should be able to figure this out. So, deal with it.”, and wasn’t willing to listen to my objection and think about it for a moment.

Admittedly, the teller whom served me was excellent - she didn’t know the answers, but was willing to do the yards to look it up, and looked to her manager for guidance.

The manager, however, either has a personal grudge against me (why, I have no idea), or is having a bad day/week/year/life and decided to be a pain in the arse.

Yeah, really!

LiveScience.com - World’s Strongest Glue! Available Only From Nature!

“There are obvious applications since this adhesive works on wet surfaces,” said study leader Yves Brun, an Indiana University bacteriologist.
[...]
Like a mess of chewing gum, the gunk globs to everything, including the tools used to create it.

“We tried washing the glue off,” Brun said. “It didn’t work.”

Sounds like [s]he’s either a smart person who just didn’t have the brain in-gear at the time, or the actual researcher got stuck to the beaker when trying to study the stuff.

…but T-shirt Hell makes it easier.

(Meanwhile I’ve been banned from making poor-pun headlines)

Uhh… Right, so I’ve also ordered two shirts from T-Shirt hell - BAAAAA Means NOOOOO! and I just killed a clown.

It was a bit of a difficult descision, but I figured I couldn’t really wear this in Germany (or Austria, for that matter) without causing an issue. Some of the others might just get me yanked off the plane, or just plain arrested.

</spam>

Yeah, it’s nearly 20 days left… now I’m starting to get nervous.

Speaking of time, someone on whirlpool recommended Timeline Gifts.
Their site isn’t exactly going to be winning any awards for excellence in design or implementation, but the price seems right - and, most importantly, they’ve got the kind of watch I’ve been looking for.

I’m probably going to order the CASIO W-753D-1A (second one on that page - the one with the stainless steel band and body). At SGD$45 (~AUD$38) it’s sufficiently cheap to take on holidays and not have to panic about it getting nicked.

Once I’m back, and depending on if the previous one broke/got nicked, I might look at getting one of the Sea Pathfinder series.

In other news… checked out backpacks at Mountain Design on Friday, currently waiting on “Josh” to call me back to find out whether they can order in the backpack (and sleeping bag) I wanted.

I’m not the only one with the idea of using desktop machines en-masse to provide distributed file storage.

Microsoft Research have a project called Farsite which has many similar aims as my DFS concept.
They’ve also got a bunch of cartoons which I’ll uhh… leave to stand on their own.

The key differences though are:
They don’t keep multiple copies of identical files, even if stored by different users.
This is… interesting, but has privacy implications (i.e: Anyone can see if someone else has a specific file, simply by querying the network for that hash). It definitely is more space efficient.

My idea uses a bit-torrent like approach to store data whereas theirs appears to store individual files everywhere
I think my approach would be slightly better for ease of distribution.
eg: putting a 500MB file on the virtual drive might cause issues, whereas splitting it up into 2MB pieces makes it much easier to digest by individual nodes.

They have a totally serverless environment, where you negotiate contracts [with other peers] individually (or the program does this on your behalf)
Anyone with the right client can participate in their network - if you want to have 500MB of storage on the network, you need to provide 500MB for other people to use.
This leaves itself open to abuse by someone who says they’re offering 10GB, but really offers only a fraction of that. Additional verification steps should help mitigate this, but may not be able to eliminate it entirely.

My approach requires that all users set aside a minimum amount of space - and accept transfer requests from others, or as specified by the server. Refusal to accept the data should result in locking the node. There’s no need to negotiate with others, since the network provides everyone with a certain amount of space.

Their system doesn’t have any backup capability
They explain this by saying the system is very well distributed, so should have little or no chance of a complete failure (Which is true).
My approach would use checkpoint (i.e diffs) type storage - so the current file is kept as a contiguous file in your cache, but diffs are kept for each save. This lets you do a ‘roll back’ to a previous version (eg: accidentally saving changes to a photo, for example - could be easily rolled back)

So:
Base (Original File) + Diff_1 + Diff_2 + Diff_3 + …. + Diff_n — allowing you to access any of those previous versions (including if the file was accidentally deleted)

When your storage quota is starting to run out, files with the oldest diffs are “rolled up” a certain amount.
So:
Take: Base,
Apply Diff_1 + Diff_2 + Diff_3 to Base , and save as New Base
Remove Original Base.
All subsequent Diffs are still valid for the new Base (since they’re diffs between Current Version+New Version).